Christmas Decorating

Instead of being in a humbug mood due to the crappiness of our situation, I’m planning on getting as much Christmas decorating done as I can today. We already unboxed the tree and plugged it in.

I know that many people prefer “live” trees (also known as dead trees since they’ve been cut down) but after years of being unable to find fresh cut trees to our liking we finally decided to go the fake tree route and haven’t returned since. Of course, the best time to buy a fake tree is right after Christmas, which is when I purchased our current one after it was 75% off. Yes, that meant that we wouldn’t be able to set it up until the following year, but we also saved an assload of money by going this route. More than likely it will be decorated with its customary blend of glass and Star Trek ornaments.

The stockings will be hung, the valences dressed in foliage and décor and the wreath on the front door. I’m uncertain what else we’ll do, but I’m looking forward to listening to Christmas music from our replica Crosley radio while decorating. And perhaps if I get really ambitious, I’ll start putting together my Christmas Quilt.

Brand Names vs. Generics

I’m not saying that I’m a brand snob, but there are certainly items I will not purchase a generic version of. Then again, there are also a large quantity of items I will not purchase the brand name version because it is too cost prohibitive.

Okay, so let me get this out of the way. My dishes I only trust to Dawn because, well it works the best out of every dish soap I’ve ever tried. My laundry I only use Tide High Efficiency because it cleans the best for our front loader washer, and is always a top pick for best buy, even though the cost is higher than a generic or other brands, you use less and it cleans better. Other items I will only purchase by brand are C&H sugars (because I prefer cane sugar over beet or corn), Downey Fabric Softener, Cheerios, Quaker Oats, Colgate toothpaste and Coke. There. I got that all off my chest.

So what items will I not purchase the name brand version of? Prescription pharmaceuticals, for one. If the generic is available, take it. Also the same for cough syrups and cold medications, allergy pills, pain medications, and vitamins (Costco carries nearly all the major brands in generic form for up to 85% less.)

Then there is the grey area of the Brand vs. Generic War, which is when the cost fluctuates sometimes making the generic more expensive than the brand. Yes, a rare occurrence, but it happens, especially in the soda, bread and canned goods sections. I’ve actually found some store brands of breads to be better than most name brands and will purchase them even if their price is slightly more than a name brand. For the most part these items are usually relatively close in price as it is, so I go with what tastes best… except for soda, which I am a stickler for Coke and Diet Coke and refuse to take my chances with the generic offerings.

Basically, if the item is cheaper and equally comparative, go that direction. If the item is superior and not comparative, go with the superior product. I mean, seriously, why spend the extra money just for the packaging which will get thrown away in the garbage anyway?

Using Every Last Scrap

The quilt I am working on requires a lot of squares… I mean a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lotta squares. For the size I want to make, I didn’t have enough squares to go around the border, so I decided to make more from the scraps.

When I was piecing and sewing the frames around the 9-patch blocks, I noticed that the larger two of the four strips was going to have excess that would need to be trimmed, and after sewing them on I used my rotary cutter to square it back up and left the scraps in a pile. Well, I was well aware that there was going to be a shortage of squares for the border because, well, I wasn’t thinking before starting this project exactly how much of everything I would need, and figured if need be I could always go find some coordinating fabric to make up the rest.

Then I started looking at those trimmed scraps a little more closely and found that if I put three of them together they were the same size as a square! ¡Muy fabuloso! I had a bunch of white squares I wouldn’t need anymore for this project, so I decided to take those leftover scraps and arrange them on the squares, making sure that they weren’t matching either in color or patterns. I then set my sewing machine to zig-zag and put the stitch on the widest setting and started sewing the scraps to the white squares. When all was said and done, I had an extra ten squares, which wasn’t enough to finish the border, but pretty close, and I figured I could make this work.

However, last night while I was piecing the rows together of the framed 9-patch blocks, I realized I had quite a bit more fabric scraps in the bag I bought it in from trimming the selvage off of some of the scraps I used to make the quilt to make them all the same size and figured I had enough there for at least another dozen squares, if not more. And so I began cutting them and got about three slices in with the rotary blade before I realized it was 9pm and Desperate Housewives was on. Alas, there are priorities, but at least I believe I’ve got enough to finish that alternating square border that originally drew me to this particular quilt pattern in the first place!

Soap

While liquid soap is great, it can be expensive. Then there is foaming hand soap, which in and of itself is ingenious, but refills for that cost a lot too. Here’s what I do.

When it comes to dishes, I use Dawn. Currently I am using Dawn Advanced Power (ultra concentrated with added enzymes to attack stuck-on food) that I get at Costco. While I am a cheapskate, dishwashing liquid is one area I refuse to skimp on, mostly because I have never been pleased with the results from any other dishwashing soap I’ve tried.

For the shower, we use Ivory bar soap. It cleans and rinses off easily, and the best part is it is relatively inexpensive, depending on where you shop. Prices vary from store to store, so while shopping for other things at various merchants, I check their price on Ivory and compare, making sure to remember to pick it up at the lowest priced location on my next trip to that particular store. The only other soap I’ve used and would use again is Dove, which, I guess technically, isn’t soap, but considered a beauty bar. It has some cleansers in it, but acts more like a moisturizing lotion, which for someone like me who has chronic dry skin, is great. But the price is a deterrent, and Ivory works rather well at cleaning.

And finally, we come to hand soap, which while I prefer regular soaps, it is getting near impossible to find any that isn’t anti-bacterial, which is probably in and of itself worthy of a whole other post on the destruction it causes on your body’s natural defenses against harmful bacteria, and may be someday. But anyway, I buy store brand liquid hand soap, even though all of our dispensers are foaming. Let me explain.

Foaming hand soap is basically regular hand soap in which more water has been added to make it foam. Why, then, does it cost the same or more than regular liquid hand soap? Obviously, it is to make more money out of you, the consumer, and which conglomerate doesn’t want that? But don’t worry, I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing for years. To make your own foaming hand soap, simply fill your container with 1 part soap to 5 parts warm water leaving about a quarter of the container unfilled, put the pump back on, and slowly tip up and down a few times to combine then leave it alone. This can take anywhere from an hour to overnight, depending on the type of hand soap, and I find that giving a gentle rock every half hour or so helps. Alternately, you can do what I’ve recently done, which is take my recently emptied refill container of liquid hand soap, fill it about 1/10 with soap and filled the container a little over half with water to get about the same ratio, and tipping up and down to combine. This way, when the bottles need to be refilled, I can simply pour directly from this container.

Making your own foaming hand soap will save you a lot of money, especially if you’re someone who washes your hands a lot like I am. Between chickens and baking, I roughly wash my hands about fifty times a day, especially if the baking is for other people. The last refill bottle I bought lasted over three years using this method, and I anticipate that same amount of time before having to purchase another bottle. I did mention how I am cheap, right? And while there are things I won’t compromise on, I simply can’t justify spending two dollars on a new bottle of foaming hand soap, when it costs just over six cents to make your own, and with very little effort at that. This is also an excellent way to make your more expensive hand soaps last longer too, but be aware that it only works with clear soaps, not creamy ones that look more like lotion. If you can pick up the bottle and see through to the other side, it’s okay. If you pick it up and see only soap and nothing on the other side, it’s not.

Television: Over the Air Broadcasting

Over the Air television is not without its faults. Sometimes just the act of getting up off the sofa will cause it to glitch… especially if it is CBS, which thank goodness there is only one thing we rarely watch on that station, The Price is Right.

Upon installing the antenna, I was amazed that our high definition channels actually looked better than they did with cable, and the pixelization effect that often occurred through our cable provider had disappeared. Funny, they told us it was our television that caused that to happen.

“Oh look dear! Every time Clark Kent turns his head, it gets all boxy and looks like he’s turning into Bizarro!”

So everything looked great, the setup seemed to work out fantastic, it was just that our fifty inch DLP* widescreen television now had a very large set of bunny ears on it. Out of the twenty five channel lineup we now had, we regularly only use six channels, and three of those are from our local PBS** stations, OPB***. Oh my, all these acronyms, and here I am a member of the AAAA****!

Well, as luck would have it, everything was going too well, because a couple weeks after we threw away the packaging and the receipt, we started seeing green semi-transparent boxes all over the screen, which only showed up on the antenna, and not the Blu-Ray or Wii. This made me assume we got a crappy antenna and it needed to be returned for an exchange, until my internet research led me to believe there was something going on with the TV. When we bought our television, we had read that you want to buy the extended warranty for DLPs because of the light bulb replacement, which can be costly. So we got a four year warranty, figuring that if it never gets used, at least we had it. Of course, within a year, the mirror-box, aka, the thing that makes this type of television a television, was dying. Cost of new mirror-box? $1600. Cost with warranty? $0. Success! Warranty already paid for itself, and everything was fine, until right after the antenna installation, which happened to be one month before the warranty was to expire. My partner quickly called the company which had taken over the warranty since the store we purchase the TV at had gone out of business thanks to our wonderful economic situation we’ve been in for some time now, and set up a date to have a repairman come out to look at it and diagnose the problem. In the mean time, suddenly the Blu-Ray started acting up too, but not in the same way, and so did the Wii in yet another way. All three of these devices, the antenna, Blu-Ray and Wii are connected to the TV via different cables, and when the repairman looked at it, he knew right away, it was the box that all these devices connect to that was the culprit… and the bulb was on its way out, so he’d order one of those too while it was still under warranty! By the time the repairman returned to install the replacement parts three weeks later, the TVs green boxes had expanded to all colors of the rainbow and it was quite psychedelic. Anyway, long story short, it wasn’t the antenna, just our TV.

Okay, let me get back to where I was going with this. We have never been a member of OPB, but talk about it often, since we watch and listen to more programming on its stations, either on TV or radio, than any other, especially now that we don’t have cable. As many people know, pubic broadcasting relies on donations from viewers for a majority of its funding, and a few times each year, they have membership drives to support this effort. During the last drive, I thought to myself about donating something, as I do get a majority of my entertainment from OPB, but the thing about me is I have terrible follow-through. Last night, and I kid you not, as I was prepared to write something completely different this morning for the second part of yesterday’s blog, we were watching History Detectives, they finished one story and went to the familiar membership drive with a host or two and a bunch of people in the background waiting to take phone calls, and my partner says, “We should become members.” I agreed, and he pulled out his phone, called the number on the screen, and donated right then and there.

So, I guess the point I am trying to get across is, are you getting your money’s worth out of the cable programming you are watching, or is a majority of it wasted? If you are, that’s great, as it is working for you, but if you aren’t, why continue to pay for it? There is so much programming from our local channels for free, and maybe that money could go to a better use. For us, we’ve been putting the money we’re saving back to our church, and recently, to the stations of OPB.

*DLP: Digital Light Processing
**PBS: Public Broadcasting Service
***OPB: Oregon Public Broadcasting
****AAAA: Anti-Acronym Association of America

Television: Ditching Cable for an Antenna

For a long time, we had cable TV, and it was good. Then, the price got too much and the content got too thin. Bye-bye, cable TV.

For some people, spending over seventy dollars a month for television is nothing. Mind you, the only perk was that we were able to not only pick up all the local channels in High Definition, but also about twenty other channels, such as Food Network and HGTV, as well as the hundreds of other channels we never watched. And so, the decision was made to get rid of cable TV, and so I went down to the office just down the street, returned the equipment, and had it shut off. We still get our internet through this cable company, but that is all… actually, they lowered our rate because we said we were looking into cheaper alternatives, which knocked almost twenty bucks a month off of that bill rather quickly. It never ceases to amaze me how existing customers can get the introductory rates simply by threatening to leave! Try it.

So, without any picture coming from our rather large television now sitting in the living room just waiting for us to pop a DVD or Blu-Ray in, or maybe even play the Wii, I decided to see if the TV had a built-in antenna. Turned it on, hit Channel Search, and waited. Nothing. So, I got online and checked out what I needed to make this work, found that it had a built-in digital tuner and came across some video of a woman making her own antenna out of a tin can, a nail, a coax cable with one end stripped and some duct tape. I had all these materials and decided, what the heck, I’d give it a try. And wouldn’t you know it, it worked. Yes it was ghetto, but if I pointed it in one direction, I got four channels, and if I pointed it just a couple inches in a different direction, I got three other channels. I went into the garage, grabbed about a foot of copper electrical wire we just happen to have a box of from installing grounded outlets in the office, formed it into a circle, and attached it. Success! Other channels!

This set up was good for about a week, until we decided to break down and buy a real antenna. So, back onto the internets went I to research indoor antennas, ranges, reliability, and most importantly, price. Once I found one that I liked, with customer feedback that was mostly positive for people in our situation anyway (about ten miles from the signals), and at a price I could justify, I went to the store to make the purchase. As luck would have it, there was only one of the model I was looking at, so I picked it up and held onto it as I looked at the others and compared, since it was the only model that was both on their website and in-store. One was cheap and ugly and had no power, and the other was expensive and ugly and did practically the same thing. Pleased with my selection, I purchased it and went home to install.

After plugging a coax cable into the antenna from the TV and plugging the power cord into the surge protector with the rest of the television components, I hit Channel Search, first without extending the rabbit ears, and picked up about ten channels. So far, it worked just as well as my ghetto antenna. Now, extending the rabbit ears all the way, I hit channel search again, but this time, twenty-five channels popped up, which is all of our local digital channels, plus two analogs that are still broadcasting. Yeah, we have TV again!

Now, for some reason or another, I got it in my head that our smaller twenty-inch TV we had in the bedroom also had a digital tuner built-in, and so I hooked up the old ghetto antenna to test it out, but the only channels it got, and with a lot of noise at that, were the two analog channels, which means that it doesn’t have a digital tuner, and those can be spendy for those of us who didn’t take advantage of the government coupons because we didn’t have the foresight that we were going to ditch our pay-service for free-service. Oh well, it is big and bulky anyway, and really, we don’t need a TV in the bedroom anyway. Besides, I’ve noticed we sleep better without it.

Tomorrow I will talk about the pros and cons of Over The Air Television.

Grocery Shopping

I usually go grocery shopping once a week, and usually it is at one of our local WinCo stores. I can get everything we need at a price we can afford. This is not to say that they are the cheapest in town on everything, but the total bill reflects the savings. However, I almost always go either Wednesday or Thursday morning because it is slower, and that is when our free paper is delivered in the mail, with ads for two other grocers here in town, Safeway and Albertson’s. It is probably a snafu to name-drop, but whatever.

Just so we are certain on this, I am not a loyalist. If we got the regular paper, filled with coupons galore, my shopping habits may be different, but doubtful, because when we did get the paper, I usually found on average one coupon a week I could actually use, and it wasn’t worth the price of the paper. So as far as coupons go, CostCo gets the prize for best coupons, even though there is a membership fee associated with it. And my twice-monthly trips to CostCo are usually quite sad for the average CostCo shopper, as my five item average dwarfs in comparison to most peoples fully loaded cart or two. But really, when I need a half-gallon of heavy cream or a 3lb bag of fair trade coffee, their prices cannot be beat, with or without coupons.

Club and Preferred cards are free and easy to obtain, and yes, you can save quite a bit of money using them. I check our weekly free paper for savings from Safeway and Albertson’s, with Safeway almost always being the better deal of the two, for their respective Club and Preferred card savings. And when they have deals on items like cereal, I stock up, checking the expiration date on each box before loading it into the cart. One trip to Safeway I bought $28.74 worth of cereal for $10, and right before Christmas spent $42.33 on $87.55 worth of groceries, all with just my Club Card. The deals are there, and usually don’t require much digging to find them.

When I am looking for a good deal on specialty cheeses or wine, my first stop is Trader Joe’s, which is also where I go when I need nuts and dried fruits. If they were closer and not in the swirling vortex of terror, aka, Chkalov and Mill Plain, I’d do more of my shopping there. And when I want to actually talk to a cheese monger, my first place is our newest Fred Meyer, or if I am on the east side of town for some reason or another, Whole Foods.

I’ve been told of another store in the area that starts with a “W” but will never shop there again as they are evil made of evil parts by an evil corporation for the sole purpose of committing evil. Yes, this is the same company which unceremoniously dug up the remains from an ancient Native American graveyard so they could put in another store. And yes, I am still bitter they chose to fire me for voicing my opinions when they were committing unethical acts that not only violated company policy, but federal law.

Anyway, back to WinCo. A typical trip there consists of pretty much the same things each week. Let me demonstrate with my list I made yesterday, which, by the way, I make my list in the order I will find these items while walking through the store, which is a huge time saver, and prevents a majority of the, “Oops! I missed that item on the list!”

 

Grocery List for February 4th, 2010

• Tortilla Chips
• Apples
• Lettuce
• Coleslaw
• Kiwis
• Lemons
• Limes
• Garlic
• Avocados
• Onions
• Green Onions
• Jalepeños
• Mushrooms
• Green beans
• Hominy
• Rice
• Beans
• Spaghetti sauce
• Spaghetti noodles
• Flour
• Turkey lunch meat
• Chicken thighs
• Pork (whatever is cheapest for pulled pork)
• Ground turkey
• Butter
• Milk
• Sour cream 
• Frozen corn
• Sandwich thins

Total bill was higher this week than usual, due to the few extras I put on the list like chips, pork, coleslaw and sandwich thins for pulled pork, as well as a few items not on my list for upcoming cake orders, like walnuts, raisins and imitation banana flavor (blech!), and a spur-of-the-moment-grab-a 12-pack-of-Diet Coke-because-it’s-on-sale, putting my bill at a grand total of $71.18, which is about $25 higher than my typical weekly trip.

The bottom line is to shop smarter. If you’re a coupon clipper, buy what you will actually use, not just what you have a coupon for, which goes for Club and Preferred savings cards too. Stock up on non-perishable (canned and boxed foods) or freezable items (like meats) when they are on sale or clearance as a way to make your food dollars stretch more. And most importantly, don’t forget to factor in gas money into the equation. It may seem like a good deal to drive all over town to get the deals at five different stores, but think about how much gas you used and if you actually spent more money driving than you saved.